Upworthy

Good morning! Here are some career updates from the journalism community:

Clark Gilbert will be president of BYU-Idaho. Previously, he was CEO of Deseret News and Deseret Digital Media. (Poynter)

Peter Kendall will be managing editor at the Chicago Tribune. Previously, he was deputy managing editor there. Colin McMahon will be associate editor at the Chicago Tribune. Previously, he was cross media editor there. Joycelyn Winnecke will be president of Tribune Content Agency. Previously, she was associate editor of the Chicago Tribune. (Poynter)

Tanzina Vega will be the Bronx courthouse reporter at The New York Times. Previously, she was a race reporter there. (Poynter)

John Reiss is now executive producer at “Meet the Press.” Previously, he was acting executive producer there.

New York Times digital deputy editor Amy O’Leary will be the new editorial director for Upworthy, the viral news curator announced Tuesday.

In her new position, O’Leary will be the top editorial staffer, responsible for overseeing the creation and dissemination of Upworthy’s brand of shareable content. She replaces founding editorial director Sara Critchfield, who left in 2014 to work as a media strategist and consultant. O’Leary will report to Upworthy co-founder Peter Koechley.

In a blog post accompanying the announcement, O’Leary said she’s leaving The New York Times because of Upworthy’s potential to harness the power of social media to shed light on important stories:

Today, I don’t think even the most talented journalist can be content to say that important stories are just ones people should read or view.

Strict, strange social-media policy at Times of India: Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd staffers have been told not to post news stories from their personal social media accounts; instead, they must create company-authorized accounts, according to Quartz India. Even weirder: the company — which publishes The Times of India and The Economic Times — “will possess log-in credentials to such accounts and will be free to post any material to the account without journalists’ knowledge,” Sruthijith KK reports. (Quartz India) | Quartz-related: How often should a site launch a redesign, like Quartz just did? Mario Garcia: “The answer varies, and there is a basic principle I follow: redesign (and/or rethink) when you need it.” (Garcia Media)

NYT’s controversial Michael Brown profile: New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan writes that calling Michael Brown “no angel” in a profile of the 18-year-old killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, was “a blunder.” (Public Editor’s Journal) | Times national editor Alison Mitchell told Erik Wemple that the phrase derived from the story’s lead, which told an anecdote about Brown seeing a vision of an angel.

For most publishers, less than 10 percent of June page views came from traffic to evergreen articles — stories that were more than three days old by Parse.ly’s definition.

Among the publishers included in the analytics company’s data: Upworthy, Conde Nast properties, The Atlantic properties, Fox News, The New York Post, Mashable, Slate, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Next Web and The New Republic.

Nearly half of the publishers see less than 5 percent of their web traffic attributed to content that is more than three days old, according to Parse.ly:

Unsurprisingly, Parse.ly found that topic-specific sites generally received a higher percentage of traffic from evergreen stories than breaking-news sites did. Upworthy doesn’t include timestamps in its stories, and many of Slate’s pieces are less time-sensitive than stories from The New York Post or Fox News and thus more likely to have a long shelf life of shareability. Read more

Here’s our roundup of the top digital and social media stories you should know about (and from Andrew Beaujon, 10 media stories to start your day, and from Kristen Hare, a world roundup):

— At Nieman Lab, Alberto Cairo takes data journalism sites Vox and FiveThirtyEight to task for “worrying cracks that may undermine their own core principles.”

— Two-thirds of respondents to a survey by Contently “said they felt deceived when they realized an article or video was sponsored by a brand,” Erin Griffithwrites at Fortune. And most readers don’t even understand what “sponsored content” means.

Here’s our roundup of the top digital and social media stories you should know about (and from Andrew Beaujon, 10 media stories to start your day):

— Upworthy has released sample code for its “attention minutes” system of measuring engagement. “We actually use attention minutes as a core company goal,” Ed Urgola, Upworthy’s head of marketing, tells Fiona Lowensteinat CJR.

— This week, Sports Illustrated becomes the latest Time Inc. magazine to undergo a website refreshing to be more mobile- and video-friendly, Emma Bazilian writes in Adweek. Poynter covered the redesigns of Time and Fortune and Money earlier this year.

— Online news and politics videos are watched to the end 43 percent of the time, according to a Coull analysis of 12 million video plays. Read more

— Media critics weren’t critical enough of Aaron Kushner’s print-centric strategy at the Orange County Register, Clay Shirkywrites, helping to poison the minds of young people who need to understand that print is in a death spiral from which it can’t recover. Read more

Audience-based accountability can be scary for reporters, especially if it’s based on imperfect page-view metrics that don’t account for the fact that what’s journalistically important isn’t always what’s popular.

So how do we acknowledge the fact that our journalism exists to be read even as we remain suspicious of purely readership-based assessments of our work? Here’s how Rick Edmonds put it in his recap of the Newspaper Association of America’s mediaXchange conference in Denver last week:

I don’t think anyone is saying that data science will fully replace “gut” calls on what to cover and play prominently. But as leading practice on digital-only sites shows, hard real-time evidence of how stories perform is both a valuable supplement to old-timey news judgment and a check on bad choices.

Nitsuh Abebe writes about Upworthy, which “publishes both some of the web’s most successful material and some of its most widely mocked and reviled.”

“I think marketing in a traditional sense, for commercialism–marketing to get you to buy ­McDonald’s or something–is crass,” says Sara Critchfield, the site’s editorial director. “But marketing to get people’s attention onto really important topics is a noble pursuit. So you take something that in one context is very crass and you put it in another. People will say, ‘That’s very crass,’ but in the service of doing something good for humanity, I think it’s pretty great.” This happens often when you ask questions about Upworthy: It turns out that whatever you were curious about is actually wonderful, because it’s ultimately in the service of the good of humankind. Would you need to be a black-hearted monster to feel that there must be a catch? Or that one will arrive next month, when Upworthy is slated to announce its long-awaited monetization strategy?